The Real Cost of Academic Discrimination against Conservatives

One has to truly step into the world of “elite” higher education to understand its isolation and its sad intellectual mediocrity. The men and women who populate our most culturally influential universities quite simply don’t understand America and its citizens. They view dissenters from the academic mainstream as a toxic combination of malicious and ignorant.

Advertisement

Advertisement

Defenders of the status quo tend to claim that this is simply the natural order of things. Conservatives, the thinking goes, self-select out of the academy because they’re more interested in commercial gain, less interested in intellectual pursuits, and repelled by the spirit of “open inquiry” and devotion to “critical thinking” that (allegedly) dominate higher education.

In a testament to how bad things have gotten, it comes as a shock that two new studies from inside the academy should employ truly open inquiry and critical thinking to posit a different, more plausible explanation, and detail its costs: Conservatives don’t self-select out of the academy; they’re culled from it by discrimination.

Northwestern University’s James Lindgren tracked the results of 16 years of law schools’ efforts to increase diversity. He found that law schools had successfully diversified faculties with regards to gender and ethnicity, such that women and minorities are now over-represented compared to their percentage of the working lawyer population. To no one’s surprise, white Christian males were under-represented in law schools, both at the beginning of the survey and at the end. Here’s Lindgren:

By the late 1990s, the proportion of the U.S. population that was neither Republican nor Christian was only 9%, but the majority of law professors (51%) was drawn from that small minority. Further, though women were strongly underrepresented compared to the full-time working population, all of that underrepresentation was among Republican women, who were — and are — almost missing from law teaching. . . .

In terms of absolute numbers, the dominant group in law teaching today remains Democrats, both male and female. Because in the general public both white women and white men tend now to vote Republican, law faculties are probably less representative ideologically than they have been for several decades.

Advertisement

Lindgren doesn’t believe that these disparities are “simply the result of discrimination,” and I agree. No one should expect that each and every American demographic will choose and succeed in professions in exact proportion to their share of the population. There are cultural differences.

That said, however, discrimination against conservatives is real — and it has disastrous consequences. James Philips, a doctoral student at the University of California–Berkeley, examined the credentials and publication rates of faculty at America’s 16 highest-ranked law schools, and found that conservative and libertarian scholars not only published more and were cited more than their peers, but also had “more of the traditional qualifications required of law professors than their peers, with few exceptions.”

#share#Evidence of superior credentials is a blow to the “self-selection” hypothesis. Rather than there existing only a few conservatives who are interested in academic careers, only a few conservatives are over-qualified enough to make it through a discriminatory process. Moreover, in the absence of known and notorious discrimination, fewer conservatives would self-select away from academic careers. People don’t like to apply for jobs for which they don’t have a realistic hope of being hired.

Academic consensus is typically a result of a combination of groupthink and radical ideology, not rigorous scholarship.

The upshot of this is that “elite” law-school faculties are no longer stocked with America’s best and brightest legal scholars. It’s a state of affairs that perfectly suits progressive purposes. The media is fond of citing “scholarly consensus” on key legal disputes, noting the overwhelming numbers of professors who, say, support same-sex marriage or oppose American detainee policies — a task made easier by the dearth of conservative dissenters. Employment at an elite law school can be decisive in determining whether a lawyer is qualified for a spot on the federal bench, which makes it more likely that liberals will become judges, which in turn benefits the project of mainstreaming legal radicalism.

Yet academic consensus is typically a result of a combination of groupthink and radical ideology, not rigorous scholarship. New cultural and legal theories are hashed out within the closed academic shop — among like-minded men and women — before being trotted out to the public as a moral and intellectual fait accompli. Against that backdrop, is it any wonder that liberal academics attribute all opposition to ignorance or bigotry? After all, every smart person they know agrees with them.

Advertisement

#related#When I left Cornell Law School, my faculty colleagues hosted a nice reception. I liked every person in my department — they were all unfailingly courteous, kind to my family, and conscientious as teachers and scholars. I tried my best to be good to them as they were to me, but at that farewell party, I cringed when a colleague toasted me by saying, “To David, the person who taught me that conservatives are people too.” She was joking, of course, and I took it in the spirit it was intended. But there was an uncomfortable truth only half-hidden in her words.

No community composed entirely of people who think like that — kind and well-meaning though they may be — is worth respecting as a neutral arbiter of public debates. The faculty-discrimination racket is real, and we all pay its price.

Recommended Articles

Most Popular

If the Democrats are really tempted by impeachment, bring it on. Since the day after the 2016 election they have been threatening this, placing their chips on the Russian-collusion fantasy and then on the phantasmagoric charade of obstruction of justice. The attorney general accurately gave the ingredients of the ...
Read More

One of the more remarkable developments of the last 50 years is the relentless commitment of a segment of the American academic and cultural elite to selling a vision of American life that is slowly but relentlessly proving to be — on balance — more harmful for children and less joyful for adults, while also ...
Read More

A few weeks ago, I noted that Louisiana’s state legislature is contemplating legislation that would bar makers of cauliflower rice from labeling their product “rice,” contending that consumers will get confused. Instead, the rice growers want the product to be labeled . . . “riced cauliflower.”
But ...
Read More

In 2012, Barack Obama was still president, indeed had four years left in his presidency. "Gangnam Style" was a world-beating music video. Game of Thrones had just gotten started. And, oh yeah, the climate scientist Michael Mann sued National Review over a blog post.
Seven years later, this case has gone pretty ...
Read More

Celebrity attorney Michael Avenatti was indicted by federal prosecutors Wednesday for stealing the identity of his former client, Stormy Daniels, in order to claim more than $300,000 she was owed for a tell-all book about her efforts to expose President Trump.
In the indictment, prosecutors for the Southern ...
Read More

New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait has continued his turn toward conspiracy theory with a new essay. Inspired by our “Against Socialism” issue, it's titled “The New Socialism Panic Is the Right’s Trick to Justify Supporting Trump.” The central thesis of Chait’s submission is that National Review ...
Read More

Every presidential primary ends with one winner and a lot of losers. Some might argue that one or two once-little-known candidates who overperform low expectations get to enjoy a form of moral victory. (Ben Carson and Rick Perry might be happy how the 2016 cycle ended, with both taking roles in Trump’s cabinet. ...
Read More

Affixing one’s glance to the rear-view mirror is usually as ill-advised as staring at one’s own reflection. Still, what a delight it was on Wednesday to see a fresh rendition of “Those Were the Days,” from All in the Family, a show I haven’t watched for nearly 40 years. This time it was Woody Harrelson ...
Read More

Data from Florida reveal that, in 2018, an overwhelming majority of women reported obtaining an abortion for reasons other than to preserve their own life or health, or due to fetal-health complications.
Women obtained about 70,000 abortion procedures in Florida last year, and more than three-quarters of those ...
Read More